> Do you see the ludicrousness of that?

I do. But strictly speaking, if God is all-powerful and outside of time, what can stop Him from altering the past? Furthermore, how would any of us know the past had been changed anyway? It would be like in (now I'm going to call on a time-travel movie) Back to the Future II, when Biff steals the DeLorean and gives a sports almanac from the future to his younger self in 1955. This created an alternate timeline that skewed off from that point and resulted in a whole alternate present, and will continue on that tangent into the future. The course of time has been changed for the whole world. But nobody living in this "new" reality has any idea that the world could have been different, had Biff never changed the past.

Back to real life: Maybe the past has been changed many times and we just don't know it. Maybe the confederates actually won the Civil War, after which somebody prayed that the union would have won. So God changed the past, and made the union win. Now, in this alternate reality, the person who originally prayed for the change doesn't pray for it, since there's no longer a need. But this has no consequence since the change has already been made. God, being all-powerful and outside of time, still heard the original prayer, even if it doesn't exist in this new reality.

If God is omniscient, what's to stop Him from seeing all realities, not just the one we're in? Every decision we make has an outcome. Suppose we're faced with a decision to make. For the sake of this example, the actual dilemma doesn't matter -- all that matters is that we must choose either "yes" or "no." If we say "yes," that leads to one result. But God sees what would have happened even if we had said "no." And He can trace the effects of that alternate reality far into the future, where that "no" may have led to many other things that built up exponentially over time. This alternate future is radically different from the future that we will see, since we said "yes" instead of "no." But God can see it.

And I might as well add that even tiny decisions can make big differences in the world due to changes in the environment around them. It's chaos theory, like Ian Malcolm and the butterfly that flaps its wings and causes rain instead of sunshine. Imagine God decided to change the past by shifting the positions of five ordinary CO2 molecules a billionth of a millimeter in one direction. Indirectly, even those slight changes can lead to bigger things, as surrounding molecules react, and the molecules that surround them react. Eventually even the slight changes at the molecular level span across the world, causing changes in weather, bird and insect flight patterns, etc. People are subconsciously affected by the weather and even the slightest activity around them, making them behave differently. And the people they influence will also behave differently, and so on. In a short time, this reality is completely different from what it could have been, but nobody even knows about those original molecules that were repositioned or how the world would be if they hadn't been tampered with.

I guess my main point, my reason for posting this, is that changing the past to eliminate a prayer from ever occuring doesn't matter, since God can see all realities -- and in one of them, the prayer did happen. And of course, God doesn't grant every foolish prayer request either, so stupid things don't slip through the cracks. He's got to use judgment and foresight, two things He has plenty of.

-useless"ohh, my BRAIN..."ness